Now the bad stuff, the really bad stuff. The AP is going after him for using its photo of Obama in his poster:

"The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Manny Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington.

The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.

'The Associated Press has determined that the photograph used in the poster is an AP photo and that its use required permission,' the AP's director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement."

And there's been a new critique making the rounds. The critique is that he's a plagiarist. Artist Mark Vallen lobbed the missive a while ago. But it's starting to pop up now.

Vallen writes:

"Plagiarism is the deliberate passing off of someone else's work as your own, and Shepard Fairey may be unfamiliar with the term – but not the act. This article is not about the innocent absorption of visual ideas that later materialize unconsciously in an artist's work, we do after all live in a maelstrom of images and we can't help but be affected by them. Nor am I referring to an artist's direct influences – which artist can claim not to have been inspired by techniques or styles employed by others? What I am concerned with is the brazen, intentional copying of already existing artworks created by others – sometimes duplicating the originals without alteration – and then deceiving people by pawning off the counterfeit works as original creations."

Vallen goes on to get personal:

"Perhaps the most important falsehood concerning Fairey's behavior is that it is motivated by some grand theory of aesthetics or weighty political philosophy – but I'm afraid the only scheme at work is the one intended to make Fairey wealthy and famous. Some have, for whatever reason, imagined Fairey to be a progressive political figure, a perception certainly cultivated by the artist; but it's also not impossible to view Fairey's work as right-wing in essence, since it largely ransacks leftist history and imagery while the artist laughs all the way to the bank."

Add to this two dimensional T-shirt portrait yet another flat depiction of the face of the Cuban revolution—Steven Soderbergh's epic, two-part, 4-hour-and-23-minute biopic Che.

Soderbergh does get a few things right: the film is shot in Spanish, provides English subtitles and stars Benicio del Toro (who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Soderbergh's 2000 film Traffic) as the Argentine medical student-turned demonstrator-turned exile Ernesto Che Guevara. Casting is one of the few areas in which the film excels, but even that is limited by Peter Buchman's (heretofore the brilliant mind behind dragon tales like Jurassic Park III and Eragon) and Benjamin A. van der Veen's script.

While sure to please the pants off history buffs for its stringent accuracy and adherence to Che's memoir "Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War," fans of Che's ideology will find gaffes and gaps of character development in the script. The film should have opened not with the 3-minute, '50s-filmstrip geography lesson but with Ernesto in Argentina, a young middle class collegian participating in student protests, organizing against the government–the reason he meets Fidel Castro in Mexico City and gets involved in the whole Cuban thing (and the fire behind his desire to bring revolution to all of Latin America, a.ka. foregrounding all of Part 2). And none of Che's post-Jan. 1, 1959 operations in Cuba make the cut. Soderbergh only alludes to the role Che plays in Cuba's ailing economy in a series of poorly sown black and white flash-forwards to his UN visit. Including at the very least a montage of his hands-on approach to sugar cane cropping and government would have begun to flesh out and highlight the fundamental differences between Che and Fidel's political ideology (del Toro's insistence that his cadres learn to read and write during the revolution's downtime manages to scratch the surface) and the real reason Che leaves for Africa and Bolivia–to escape his entrapment in Castro's Cult of Personality.

What's more, even in the midst of the Maestra, Che was a ladies man, as aware of his looks and charm as he was of his thin-mountain-air-addled asthma. A brief consult of one of the hundreds of biographies written about the man would have told Buchman that. But watching march after march, skirmish after skirmish, and toothless campesino after barefoot child as the revolutionary ants go marching on in Part 1(as for Part 2, it's basically Part 1 but set in Bolivia, a dead horse whose flogging is truncated by the emotionally sterile treatment of Guevara's 1967 execution), it seems as though the writers used an equation to crank out the script: 100 frames x 12 beseechments of troops to quit/study/leave campesinos alone ÷ 3 asthma attacks = 1 page of Che's memoir sloppily slapped on paper for the silver screen. What happened to interviews with family members, Che's infamous motorcycle diaries. What happened to multiple sources?

If Soderbergh et al wanted to make a film about guerilla warfare a la Che Guevara, they succeeded. To be sure, the battles are bloody and the film is beautiful–the tight, grainy, black and white auteur-shots of del Toro's unshaven lips wrapped around a Cuban cigar were much appreciated. But to give the name "Che" to a film mostly about battle tactics is misleading; this war film has little to do with unpacking the character of the revolutionary whose egalitarian ideology was–at least to Che–bigger than life itself.

Now playing in D.C. at Landmark E Street Cinema, "Che" is set for wide release Jan. 24